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The persistent high wage premium associated with college education, despite increasing participation rates, continues to generate a great deal of academic and policy interest. While it is widely agreed that the financial benefits associated with college completion outweigh the costs, modeling and empirically estimating the returns are complicated. A simple theoretical framework on educational investment illustrates the decision-making processes and key factors, such as expected returns, that guide the choice of an individual to engage in higher education and to achieve an optimal level of educational investment. Broadening the investment model, however, is instrumental to account for potential heterogeneous returns to higher education—the variation in returns by institution, field of study, and students’ background characteristics, among others—and to recognize the wider societal benefits of higher education, beyond private returns. The challenges involved in estimating the returns to higher education and the heterogeneity in returns are central in the discussion. Interpreting a naive correlation between education and wages is complicated by the nonrandom selection of individuals into higher education, such that individuals who are most likely to benefit from higher education are also those most likely to attend. Advancements in data collection, the ability to track individuals from compulsory education to the labor market, and improvements in econometric methodologies have enabled researchers to causally estimate the impact of higher education on earnings and allow for an improved insight into the disparities in returns to higher education. Recognizing the links between students’ characteristics (or backgrounds) and associated constraints helps to understand differences in higher education choices. Similarly, identifying differences in labor market returns associated with attending certain colleges or pursuing particular academic disciplines is as important in shedding light on the complex nature of human capital disparities and the signaling effect of higher education. As the costs of higher education provision constitute an increasingly large share of government spending all over the world, the high returns to college raise questions associated with who should pay for attending college and the role of the state. Internalizing the social returns to education and their broader implications on the growth and the persistence of inequality complicates this discussion. Higher education funding is one potential policy instrument to influence college attendance and returns. It is not, however, the only one. Better information on returns to education or access to policies that target members of certain social groups might be other potential tools to overcome constraints.

The interaction between poverty and social policy is an issue of longstanding interest in academic and policy circles. There are active debates on how to measure poverty, including where to draw the threshold determining whether a family is deemed to be living in poverty and how to measure resources available. These decisions have profound impacts on our understanding of the anti-poverty effectiveness of social welfare programs. In the context of the United States, focusing solely on cash income transfers shows little progress against poverty over the past 50 years, but substantive gains are obtained if the resource concept is expanded to include in-kind transfers and refundable tax credits. Beyond poverty, the research literature has examined the effects of social welfare policy on a host of outcomes such as labor supply, consumption, health, wealth, fertility, and marriage. Most of this work finds the disincentive effects of welfare programs on work, saving, and family structure to be small, but the income and consumption smoothing benefits to be sizable, and some recent work has found positive long-term effects of transfer programs on the health and education of children. More research is needed, however, on how to measure poverty, especially in the face of deteriorating quality of household surveys, on the long-term consequences of transfer programs, and on alternative designs of the welfare state.

Longstanding international frictions over uneven levels of protection granted to intellectual property rights (IPR) in different parts of the world culminated in 1995 in the form of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)—a multilateral trade agreement that all member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are obligated to follow. This landmark agreement was controversial from the start since it required countries with dramatically different economic and technological capabilities to abide by essentially the same rules and regulations with respect to IPRs, with some temporary leeway granted to developing and least developed countries. As one might expect, developing countries objected to the agreement on philosophical and practical grounds while developed countries, especially the United States, championed it strongly. Over the years, a vast and rich economics literature has emerged that helps understand this international divide. More specifically, several fundamental issues related to the protection of IPRs in the global economy have been addressed: are IPRs trade-related? Do the incentives for patent protection of an open economy differ from those of a closed one and, if so, why? What is the rationale for international coordination over national patent policies? Why do developed and developing countries have such radically different views regarding the protection of IPRs? What is the level of empirical support underlying the major arguments for and against the TRIPS-mandated strengthening of IPRs in the world economy? Can the core obligations of the TRIPS Agreement as well as the flexibilities it contains be justified on the basis of economic logic? We discuss the key conclusions that can be drawn from decades of rigorous theoretical and empirical research and also offer some suggestions for future work.

In many countries of the world, consumers choose their health insurance coverage from a large menu of often complex options supplied by private insurance companies. Economic benefits of the wide choice of health insurance options depend on the extent to which the consumers are active, well informed, and sophisticated decision makers capable of choosing plans that are well-suited to their individual circumstances. There are many possible ways how consumers’ actual decision making in the health insurance domain can depart from the standard model of health insurance demand of a rational risk-averse consumer. For example, consumers can have inaccurate subjective beliefs about characteristics of alternative plans in their choice set or about the distribution of health expenditure risk because of cognitive or informational constraints; or they can prefer to rely on heuristics when the plan choice problem features a large number of options with complex cost-sharing design. The second decade of the 21st century has seen a burgeoning number of studies assessing the quality of consumer choices of health insurance, both in the lab and in the field, and financial and welfare consequences of poor choices in this context. These studies demonstrate that consumers often find it difficult to make efficient choices of private health insurance due to reasons such as inertia, misinformation, and the lack of basic insurance literacy. These findings challenge the conventional rationality assumptions of the standard economic model of insurance choice and call for policies that can enhance the quality of consumer choices in the health insurance domain.